Frequent Miler on the Air - Shortcuts to Flying Blue elite status | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep372 | 8-21-26

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Get 15% of on Saily E-SimsThis podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerOn today's episode, we'll talk about the many ways to shortcut Flying Blue elite status and why you might want to.Giant Mailbag(00:50) - Credit cards we're considering | Coffee Break Ep118 - Credit cards we're consideringCrazy Thing: Citi - Greg announce(03:32) - Citi ThankYou MastercardLearn about Citi's retailer cards hereMattress Running the Numbers(09:12) - 50X AA miles for Stand Up for Cancer donationLearn more about this hereBonvoyed - Feeling Blue about Flying Blue?(14:49) - Flying Blue to increase Standard award prices and introduce Light and Flex award faresLearn about Flying Blue's Light and Flex award fares hereThis Week in Points(23:42) - Greg- Bilt adds new Bilt Cash Options (Learn how to use Bilt Cash to book Blade rides here)(34:08) - Tim - Cardpointers: automatic "smart add" feature for Amex Offer priority (https://frequentmiler.com/workarounds-for-adding-amex-offers-to-multiple-cards-appear-to-be-dead/Learn some workarounds for adding Amex offers to multiple cards which appear to be dead here: )Personal Points(38:16) - Atmos 100K companion cert caveats (Learn all about Atmos Companion Awards here: https://frequentmiler.com/atmos-global-companion-awards-guide/)Main Event: Shortcuts to Flying Blue elite status(52:35) - Learn shortcuts to Flying Blue elite status here: https://frequentmiler.com/elite-status-via-the-air-france-klm-credit-card/ And why is Flying Blue status interesting?(58:57) - How Flying Blue elite status works(1:03:29) - Normal way to earn XPs(1:09:24) - ShortcutsLearn about Flying Blue Status Match (US residents version) here: https://frequentmiler.com/flying-blue-status-match-for-us-residents/Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. Today's main event, shortcuts to flying blue elite status. Frequent Miller on the air starts now. On today's show, we're going to talk about many ways to shortcut your way to flying blue elite status and why you might want to. Hi, this is Greg. And this is Tim. I am filling in for Nick Reyes this week because Nick is in the Santa Claus Village in northern Finland on an all-night poker tournament.

So I'm taking his place for this week only. And if Nick was here, he would tell you that if you want to jump ahead, you could look at the timestamps in our show notes and jump ahead and, you know, like and subscribe and do all those things that you've learned to do from Nick when he's not off in Finland or wherever he is today. Let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. Well, this week for the Giant Mailbag, speaking of, we have a little, we have a note, a concern from a person named Nick. And Nick aired this in something called Frequent Milers Coffee Break. I believe it was episode 118, something called Credit Cards We're Considering. Now, Nick said that he was hesitant to get the Choice Privileges card for its annual

30k points bonus because he'd have to remember to put spend on it regularly to prevent the card from shutting down or getting shut down or closed for lack of use. And at that point, there was someone named, I believe, Greg, if I'm reading this correctly, that said that cards that have annual fees don't get canceled for lack of use. No need to be concerned about that. So what do you think about that, Greg. Would you agree with that, Greg? All right. So Tim is obviously joking around about conversation Nick and I had in that recent coffee break. And as luck would have it, apparently someone from Chase was listening to that coffee break because days after we had that conversation, I got a message from Chase saying they were shutting down my Marriott Premier

business card, which is a $99 per year card due to insufficient usage. So, wow. So not only was I proven wrong about that little statement, but I lost another collectible card. This is one of those cards that you can't get new anymore. And so it was a nice way for $99 a year to get a Marriott free night certificate. And now that card is gone. Sad. Oh, man. The sound you hear in the background is the horn playing taps in memory of the Bonvoy card. You know, but honestly, I would have thought the same thing. When I was listening to that exchange, when Nick was saying that, I'm like,

you know, when there's a 95, as long as you pay the annual fee, they're not going to close the card. I've never had that happen. Yeah. Which goes to show you that everybody at J.P. Morgan Chase is ravedly consuming the frequent miler on the air. Or at least everybody in the no longer available Marriott business card collection on that team. The people who manage classic purgatory over there at Chase or they have their ears up. All right. Let's move on to what crazy thing did City do this week?

Yeah, this is a fun one. And I've wanted to sort of, we haven't really known how to write about this or talk about this. But it's a fun way that city is like effectively putting money directly into my pocket. So there's a city thank you master card that exists. And it's a weird card. It will link the card page from the Frequentweiler website here in the show notes. It is it awards thank you points. It is a city credit card, but it's managed by something called city retail services.

And how this thing came into my possession was I used to have something called the Sears Shop Your Way card, which then became the Shop Your Way card, that when you spent on it, you got points that you could use towards various retail items and gift cards and things like that. The actual points you earned weren't very good. But it was known for these incredible spending offers where, like, it would say you can earn 10% back at electronic stores up to 750. a month or 15% back on dining and grocery for up to $1,200. And a lot of times these things would stack. So if you could figure out ways to combine them, like you could get up to 15, 20, even sometimes 25% back on your spending. Well, like Sears and really a lot of retailers this way, the shop your weight card ended

up transitioning outside of city. So city converted it into this thank you master card. And it actually was a great change because now instead of getting shop your waypoints, it gives you 5x on gas, 3x on grocery and dining, 3x department stores, and 3x at drugstores. And that's coming back as thank you points instead of shop your waypoints. So it's really, I mean, on its own, it's a great card. Yeah, that's tremendous. Yeah, totally, totally.

I mean, you know, it's actually, it's in my wallet just in general because of the spending categories. but when it converted all of those those old shop your way devotees myself included were sort of we were kind of on pins and needles because we're saying well you know there's no way they're going to continue these spending offers are they well boy have they ever currently right now on my account i have get 12% back everywhere up to 1500 per month for the next three months i think it is or four months, get $120 back after you spend $1,200 per month and the combination of dining gas and grocery or $60 back on $600 per month. So it's 10% back. It just depends on the threshold you hit. $75 back on up to $750 or if once you hit $750 in online purchases. And so effectively,

take away the online thing by spending $1,500 per month in dining gas and grocery, I'm getting $300 per month back, plus somewhere between 4,500 to 7,500 city points, depending on like how that spending ends up or going to happen. Wow, that is nuts. Okay, so for those of us who never had a shop your way card, tell us real quick, how can we get this card you're talking about now? Well, so I'm not sure. And that's why we haven't written about it a lot, is there's no sure way, like,

there's no real clear path to get one. However, now I'm, I was kind of digging some, some, digging around the other day and found out that city still, Sears Shop Your Way wasn't the only retailer card that city has. City has this thing called City Retailer Services, which is distinct from regular city that specifically offers retailer cards. And they actually have a website that you can look at all their store cards. They have Bloomingdale's, LLB, Dillards. I had, no idea that there were dealers anymore until I saw it listed here. And so what I'm curious about, normally we avoid retailer cards like the plague because they take up 524 slots. They're not very rewarding, all those sorts of things. However, what I'm curious about is since when this card

transitioned out, it automatically went to the thank you master card. I'm curious if someone were to sign up or has one of those city retailer cards from Goodyear or Wayfar or whatever, if they would be able to call up and actually manually do a product change. So if anybody listening to this has one of those cards, doesn't use it, it's somewhere in your sock drawer somewhere, I would love to get a data point from someone who actually tried to call up just to see if you actually could manually change it. Because if you could, this card is incredible. Yeah, yeah.

Isn't another option to get a DeLorean, drive it 88 miles per hour, and go back in time, sign up for the Shop Your Way card, etc.? Yeah, and so that's really a more straightforward way, actually. You may want to consider that. Instead of calling up to product change your Goodyear card, you may want to see if there's a Doloreen somewhere that you could figure it out, or you could figure out how to get a hold of. Seems reasonable to me. Oh, man, I'm so bummed that I don't have that card. Anyway, maybe I need to go shop those retailer cards and see what we can do. But looking forward to hearing what people write to us about it if they try it.

Yeah, totally. All right, moving on, let's do mattress running the numbers. What's up today that we can mattress run or discuss? Well, this is less a mattress run. It's more a donation run. So every year, American Airlines Advantage runs a promotion with stand-up to cancer, which is a group that, like its name says, does cancer research, funds cancer research, that sort of thing. And it sounds like when you first read about it,

it sounds like an incredible promotion. It is, for every dollar you donate to stand-up for cancer, you get 25 advantage miles. For every dollar you donate to stand-up for cancer, you donate to stand-up for if you put it on your advantage airline or your American Airlines Advantage credit card, you get 50 miles per dollar. So not only do you get the miles from your spend on the actual card, as well as whatever, as well as loyalty points, you would also get 50 miles per dollar.

And this is valid for through the end of September. And they have this weird thing where they say it's valid until that date or until the promotion, or until they receive a certain amount of donations. My guess being that AA just doesn't want to, like there's a maximum amount of miles that they want to give out around this thing. And so it's until September 30th, or you get, they hit $5 million in donations.

Now, it's a 501C3 organization. So any donation that you normally give to stand up to cancer would be tax deductible. However, there's one big, and it's a very big gotcha. AA has not been reading our reasonable redemption values, which begs advantage miles at the average cost of 1.4 cents, I think is what we have it on. They value these at three cents per mile.

Ouch. Yeah, I guess that's what they sell them at when they're not on sale, right? Right. So they're essentially saying that you are, for every mile that you're receiving, you're, they're valuing that what you're getting at three cents per mile. So if you get 30,000 miles from this promotion, A.A. is going to say that you got $900 worth of value or of goods valued from that promotion. So you're really not going to get a tax deduction for most people.

So my question to you, Greg, you have an AA credit card still, I think. I do. Okay. You like advantage miles. I do. So would you donate? You can donate to up to $10,000. That $10,000 would get you, what, $500,000 A.A.

Miles, if you put it on your AA MasterCard? Are you going to run, are you going to jump in with both feet? I'm not with both feet. I'm considering it. So here's the thing. You know, it's not, it's not, if you just consider it, is it a good deal? I'd say no. But this is buying American Airlines miles for two cents each, right?

That's what you're paying for, for these miles, basically, is how the math works out, which is, can be a good deal under certain circumstances, but if you don't have an immediate use for them, I would not recommend doing that. So that's the situation I'm in. I've got hundreds of thousands of American Airlines miles right now. I'm not going to go out and buy American Airlines miles for two cents each. That said, I'm assuming this is a good cause, and I haven't done my research to see, you know, is this one of the organizations that handles their finance as well?

That's the kind of thing I'd want to research first to see. is this doing good, you know, I would be, I would consider, you know, sort of taking the hit of spending that much per American Airline mile if I knew it was doing good. And I just, as at this moment, as we're discussing this, I don't know that one way or another. Totally. How about you? Not a chance. Not a chance.

And that said, I do completely agree with everything you just said. I'm not necessarily looking. My charitable giving is already taken with other things. And so I'm not necessarily just looking for a place to give charitably. And I also don't care about AA loyalty points. And I've got plenty of AA miles. So I wouldn't. It's not necessarily something I would think about doing.

However, you know, there were a couple readers that responded. And I thought, you know, the points are legitimate. They said, hey, I don't have a way of getting a large amount of AA miles right now. And I want loyalty points. I'm low on AA miles. The credit card situation is not. Like, let's say, if you shut down with city, you may not have a way to get more AA miles because they're now all through

the city, right? Right. So they said, hey, this is, you know, I'm based on what I'm going to use these for, this is, this is for me. And it makes sense in those cases. And it's doing something good. So I wouldn't necessarily like discounted offhand and say, oh, this is a bad deal. Just to say that within my personal situation,

it's not necessarily something I'm looking at. to do. And so now we're on to this week's Bonvoid of the week. And Greg, it sounds like you may be feeling a little blue about Air France, KLM, Flying Blue. Yeah, I am. Flying Blue has announced a devaluation of sorts. What's going to happen is beginning September 8th. They are going to increase their standard award prices for their savor-level fares. They don't really call them savor-level fairs. They call those fairs like something like lowest-priced fares or something like that.

But anyway, they have the concept of lowest-price-priced fares, which between North America and Europe is usually 60,000 points. That's the lowest you can find business class between those two continents. And here's what the... devaluation is. If you want the same type of ticket, a standard award, the price for that 60,000 point award, that's going to jump up to 75,000 points. But they are going to make you think the price hasn't changed by showing you a 60,000 point option, which is their new light fare, which is kind of think of it like basic economy, but it's not limited to economy. So you have a light, you know, light economy, light premium economy and light business class where you will not be able to make any changes

or get any refund if you want to cancel. You have fewer check bags. You have like there's a lot of restrictions that make it pretty darn unappealing. On the other end of things, if you want to pay even more than the new standard price, you can do that and you can book a flex fair. And that's freely changeable and cancelable and even cost less as far as the cash copay often. So that sounds great. But the point price is something like 80% more than the, oh, wow. Than the savor or then the light fare. Sorry. Wow. So that's what's happening. It's not all as bad as it sounds because there's some things that make this more palatable, I guess. For one, this only

affects those savor or lowest price fares. So, for example, if you've been looking at business class to Europe and you've seen some flights that are 90,000 points one way or 100,000 in that range, you might have been thinking, well, that's not terrible. It's not, you know, the best you can find, but not terrible if it goes on the day you want and everything. I've booked some like that in the past when it's exactly what I needed. Those are not those lowest price saver fares. So you won't have the choice with those to book a light or flex award. So you'll just book in a saver, I mean, into the standard, which is the same as today,

which is 70 euros to change or cancel and the normal amount of check bags and all that kind of stuff. The other kind of saving grace, I guess, if you book your Air France or KLM flight with other miles, with like Delta miles or with Virgin Atlantic miles, for example, that is no impact. You can't accidentally book into one of these light buckets. So it'll just be booked as standard as ever. Same thing the other way. If you use your flying blue miles to book a Delta flight, for example, it's not going to force the Delta to flight into some weird, weird basic economy or anything like that.

Okay. Yeah. So there are limits to how far this goes. And the other thing that limits the effect of this is having elite status. One of the nice things that they've done is they've said that elite status benefits work, even if you book the light fare. And so why that's important is because some of the light fare restrictions are completely, partially or completely undone with elite status.

So, you know, the not having a check bag for free. Okay, well, you have elite status. Now you do. Not being able to make a scene assignment in advance. You have elite status. Now you do. And being able to change or cancel, though, you have to get all the way up to flying blue platinum status to get that benefit.

And then you can make those changes for free, actually, if you have platinum. So we'll talk about that more in today's main event. Yeah, I appreciate that you, what's funny is that you wrote that whole post about Air France elite status or flying blue elite status before we even knew that there were changes coming. And like the timing is perfect. I mean, really was perfect. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, it really it ups the value of elite status. However, the flip side of that is for those who don't have elite status.

I don't want to go through all the chicanery that you're going to describe here in a little bit. It does give a hit to flying blue miles as a whole, from my point. But so, like, where does this affect how you think? Because you've been a big flying blue fan for a long time. You use flying blue. You've transferred and redeemed a lot of flying blue miles. Does this change how you think about the program in a significant way? I mean, I don't know if in a significant way, I see it as a straight up devaluation.

25% to 30%. And but if it if you get platinum status, you can erase that devaluation because suddenly those light fares become palatable. And so, you know, from that point of view, anyway, yeah. So it's all tied up to in in thoughts about elite status. But without thinking about elite status, it's just straight up a devaluation. Now, that said, 75,000-point awards, business class awards to Europe from anywhere in the United States or North America is still a competitive price. It's not the best possible, but it's competitive with many other programs. So it's not like way out there.

Unfortunately, they do have these days pretty high surcharges that go along with your booking. So that's gotten much worse since I last used Flying Blue Miles. So that part, which has been happening gradually, well, sometimes all it once, but over time it's been getting worse and worse, that's sort of an ongoing devaluation that, you know, we've been living with for a while now. I guess you could argue, or maybe someone at Flying Blue would argue that, but hey, we're fixing that with the flex fares because you can pay more. miles and get and have lower surcharges which I guess is true but it's if you if you're doing it just to reduce the surcharges that's it's not a good value for your miles to do that so you're getting less than one cent per mile value by doing that at least in the example that they shared with us however if you don't mind paying more miles to get free changes and

cancellations then you know the the the reduced cash component certainly helps a bit to take away the sting. Right. No, totally. Yeah, I love whenever a loyalty program says that they're making changes to a program because this is what their customers have been asking them for. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah, that's the worst. Absolutely the worst. Yeah, it's sort of like Uber the other day. I got a thing about Uber one saying, you know, great enhancements. We're reducing the your rewards from 6% to 5%. Great.

That's an odd use of the word enhancement. I'm not sure that's what you're meant. So Flying Blues materials, I'm not sure they're really calling an enhancement as much as they talk about giving you more choice. So you're excited to now have choices. Do you want to spend the same as before and get less? Or do you want to spend more and get the same or way more

and get a little more? What a generous choice to offer. Cheers to you, Flying Blue. That's terrific. Okay, so Flying Blue took something away. You should say took something away, but devalued. However, for this week in points, it sounds like Built might have actually added a little bit of value to Bill Cash.

Yeah. What did they do? Yeah. So just backing up a little bit, for those who aren't, as familiar with built ecosystem. Built credit cards all earn a certain number of points per dollar, depending on what you're spending and where. But they also earn 4% and built cash for every dollar you spend.

And the options for spending built cash have been kind of limited. So if you're spending a lot with your built credit card, you are likely like me, a wash and built cash and not knowing what to do with it. So when there are new options that are actually attractive to you for how to spend built cash, it's I find it pretty exciting. So the first one that they released is they finally made Blade helicopter rides available to use your built cache.

You can redeem your built cash for Blade helicopter rides. So Blade is a service that will, they're at a few different places worldwide, but basically for those in America in New York City, if you fly into Newark or JFK, you can take a blade helicopter to Manhattan or go the other way. If you're flying out of those airports, you could go from Manhattan to one of those airports. Normally, the price for a blade helicopter ride is somewhere in the 200 to 250 range, sometimes maybe a little bit more depending on demand, I'm not sure. what they've allowed with built cash is to spend up to $350 twice per year,

but each of those only account for one ride. So if you spend $200 on a Blade helicopter ride, that uses up one of your $350. It doesn't take $350 from you, but it takes away one. takes away one of your uses of built cash towards Blade. And so if there's two people riding, so you book for two people, your two a year will be gone with just one trip to the airport or from the airport.

There are, though, Blade has multiple fare types. This is kind of like the flying blue thing. There's Basic, which has no, which has, will charge you for changes or cancellations. Flex, which has no change fee. And Max, which both refunds up to, refunds to the original payment if you cancel, but also gives you more baggage allowance. And that's big because a normal blade helicopter ride ticket has very small. like weight allowance of how much your bag can weigh that goes with you. Otherwise, you've got to pay a lot more for any extra weight or extra bags. And the max fare gives you more. And bringing that up because if you

have built platinum status, you are allowed to use your built cash to book a max fare. And so rather than, you know, if you can imagine a ticket maybe being $200, but a max fare for that same flight might be 350, then that would be perfect because then you'd be instead of wasting the extra $150 of built cash that doesn't get used, you would be fully using it and also be able to change the date if you need to and or and significantly bring more stuff with you at no extra fee. So I really like that. Unfortunately, the prices don't exactly work out like that, at least I look briefly and I was seeing like maybe the lowest I saw after everything was lumped in for a max fare was $370.

So not bad. I would only have $20 out of pocket. But, and I probably would consider that so as to avoid having to worry about taking, you know, just my small backpack and even weighing that beforehand. I'm not too high. Because it's like 25 pounds, right? is the limit, I think, for a luggage. You know, I just, I can't remember off the top of my head what the, what the, what the

It's a really small amount though. It's not like it is small amount that even people who travel with a carry on would likely have a more than they could take on to the car. Oh, yes. Oh, definitely. Yeah. I was literally there with my backpack. I mean, my backpack was stuff full of stuff and they told me on one of my rides,

oh, this exceeds the weight, but they, they were okay. They, they didn't charge me. They're like just be careful next time or something. Wow. But I wouldn't count on that happening. Oh, totally. Wow. With your backpack.

Well, so you've, you've ridden these a couple times, right? Twice now. You have been on a blade. Yes. Yep. Yep. And it sounds like this would be an exciting news for you, Bill Cash. Yeah.

You know, it makes a trip to New York City like all that more, much more fun, exciting, less hassle. the process of getting to the airport or getting from the airport to Manhattan is is so it's it's fun it's fast and fun at least that was my experience the two times I did it with with blade whereas you know the normal thing is kind of drudgery of of getting an uber and usually waiting for one for quite a while and then finally getting one and then getting stuck in traffic for god knows how long you know all that stuff is uh is avoided as long as the weather is okay to actually fly. That's the thing.

Yeah, and it sounds like weather cancellations can be relatively, I mean, not common, but they do happen more than like it would with the plane. Yeah, I think they're equipped to, like, chauffeur you to where you're going if they have to cancel. So that's a good backup. Yeah, totally. Totally. Well, that's cool. That's a fun addition. And we've, just as a shout out to Carrie Yoder, we, and asked us anything a while ago, somebody asked us to do the over-unders for when Bill would finally add Blade redemptions to their built cash options. And I think Carrie said September by September. And so she was the closest. So congratulations, you've won $50. forgot about that. FM bucks.

But so that, but Blade didn't just add, or sorry, Bill didn't just add Blade. There's also some additional built cash options, right, with Equinox? Yeah,

they have a new tie up with Equinox. And there's several things going on there. This was just released on the day that we're recording this. So I haven't fully, you know, grasped everything going on. But the thing that really stood out to me was, they announced that you'll be able to use your built cash for Equinox spa treatments,

personal training sessions, and studio Pilates sessions. Now, of those three, it's the spa treatments I find really interesting. It's not a studio Pilates? No, but I mean, I might do that, but wouldn't it be cool to combine? So if you're overflung with built cash that you don't know what to do with, you know, schedule a trip to New York City, a weekend or whatever, take a helicopter into the city and, you know, reserve spa day and have it all on built cash would be pretty darn cool. What I don't know, though, is some of the language of the announcement makes it sound like you

have to be an Equinox member in order to spend your built cash for those things. And so, yeah. So I don't know about that, but doesn't the Amex business platinum or something have a, I feel like either, is it just the business platinum or all platyms, I forget, have an Equinox credit, which maybe you could use that to get like a digital subscription or something and maybe that would count? I don't know. This is conjecture at this point. So I don't know how. You know, easy it'll be to use your built cash for those things if you're not interested in an Equinox membership overall. There are limits to how much built cash you could spend on spa treatments and whatnot, depending on your built status. So if you have no status, so you're blue, blue status, you could spend $75 twice per year, silver status. You could spend $100 twice per year. and gold and platinum, you could spend $150 twice per year.

And I think that's probably getting to where you could have a reasonable massage paid for. Totally. Man, that's cool. I mean, it'll be fun to sort of as people start to play around with this. If in fact there's a way, even if you have to combine your Equinox credits, if there's a way to use built cash for a massage, that, I mean, that seems like, I mean, absolutely. Add an actual real. exchange like a dollar per dollar towards a massage.

Yeah. That would be pretty incredible. Yeah. And I actually got a spa treatment at a Equinox gym in Manhattan few years back. And it was excellent. So I can't promise. They're all excellent. Probably not.

But at least I know there are some really good ones out there. Yeah. That's cool. That's a great development. Or could be a great development anyway. All right. Anything else happening this week in points? Well, so just as a quick kind of follow-up,

a couple of weeks ago, we wrote a post about how the workarounds for adding Amex offers to multiple cards looked like it was dead. And to back up a little bit, some people are probably saying, well, wait a minute, you can't add an Amex offer to more than one card. It says it in the terms and conditions. But it turns out that you, at least historically, you were able to, so long as you added to them really fast. So there were a couple ways of doing it. Some people would, let's say they wanted to have one offer on three different cards, they would open it up on three different cards, like in different tabs, and then quick go add, add, add, and be able to do it that way. Other times, the other thing that you could do, there's these, there's various

services that will save wise as one of them, card pointers is another, that will add or could add, they just added the offer so quickly that they would add every single Amex offer that you had to every single card. So those offers would be on every single card. Well, it turns out that Amex, it seems, has caught up on the back end with this sort of stuff. And now it's no longer able to, most people are no longer able to add them into multiple cards regardless of how fast they go. However, and so what that led me and us to sort of think about is, okay, now you're going to have to actually be much more aware of what you're doing with those tools when you're adding and when you're using them to automatically add offers because before you wouldn't have to be

concerned about it because it would just add it everywhere so you could look and find which cards it was on and just use the card that you wanted to to trigger that offer well we heard from card pointers anyway and I imagine there will be similar developments with save wise and any other tools that are out there as well that within like 24 hours of this happening or 48 hours they've already coded a fix and now card pointers has added a smart ad feature for amex offers where if you don't do anything it will automatically add the offer to the card that has the highest category bonus for that offer. So for instance, like if you had a restaurant offer, a dining offer, and you had an Amex gold that gives you $4x per year on per dollar, it would automatically put that on the Amex.

gold card, which is cool. So if you don't do anything, it'll be that way, or it'll do it that way. However, it also allows you to then do, like, manually prioritize which card you want your MX offers added to. So for instance, let's say you have a new platinum card or a new Bond Boy Brilliant card or something, and you want to be able to work, you're just spending on that card because you want to earn the welcome offer. You can then say, only add the offers to that card if it's on multiple cards, and then

you'll be able to trigger them doing your spending on that card, which is pretty cool. The other thing that they told us, which I was actually surprised and is kind of a fun tidbit, is evidently the nerfing of the multi-add feature, the ability to add to multiple cards, only, but only affects about 90% of card holders. So about 10% still have that ability to manually add cards. We don't know if there's any rhyme or reason or what that is. So you can actually also still choose to have them try to add it to every single card. And if you can, then you'll find out you're one of the lucky 10%.

But regardless, I think it's pretty cool that already these tools are responding to those developments to maintain their utility when it comes to Amex offers. Yeah, no, totally. That's great. That's a great enhancement. And I love that idea of adding them to the cards that have the best category bonus, for example. Oh, cool. Really cool idea. Yeah, totally.

All right. Let's move on to personal points. What's going on in our lives there? Well, so I have recently, for the first time, used one, I have two, and used one, at most 100K companion award. And we have a blog post about these awards. I think it's called All About Atmos Companion Awards. And so what these are, the Alaska Summit card has two different companion awards.

They both are only applicable to award travel. One is a 25,000 point award that you get every year upon your cardholder anniversary. The other is a 100,000 point award that you get every year, that you spend $60,000 within the card member year. And they both work in a similar fashion in that they're only valid for one-way and round-trip awards. And they are effectively at discount. So let's say if you were to book two tickets that were 110,000 points apiece, you could apply that. So 220,000 points total.

You could then use that award. It would take 100,000 off. You would pay 120,000 total. and you can use it on tickets that are below 100,000 points, but it uses the entire ticket. You can only use the ticket once, or the award ones. So my wife had gotten her companion award from her summit card quite a bit ago. I want to say back in January.

And so they're good for 12 months. You can book travel outside of the validity period or the expiry, but you have to use it within 12 months. And I knew that I was going to be getting one this month. So I wanted to use my wife's first. And we've been planning a trip to Southeast Asia. So once Alaska added Philippine Airlines to their redemption options, that is a perfect opportunity.

So I was looking the other day and I found there's been terrific availability on Philippine Airlines, really from around the United States, but especially from the West Coast. And I was wanting to go from Seattle to Jakarta. Now, there's a couple bummers with this. The one bummer is that while there's a ton of availability, Philippine Airlines has two different cabins. One is a normal one seat on each window,

two seats in the middle, or what we call a one-two-one. That's their nicest cabin. They have it in a small amount of their 7-8-7s and all of their Airbus A-350s. And the other cabin, which is much more common, is a 787 that has two seats, three seats, and two seats, or what we call it 2, 3, 2, 2.2. And that does not go fully lie flat. So I'm told that it's like, I've read a fair amount about it. And supposedly it's almost fully flat and it's a very long bed.

So people don't report it necessarily affecting your sleep that much. or not at all, at least as far as I've read. But still, I would rather have a fully lie flat one-two-one cabin than a angled fly flat two-three-two without thinking about it. So I looked around a little bit and I saw that that Philippine Airlines flies the A350s from San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia, from Seattle and Los Angeles, they fly the 232 cabins.

And I was able to find on the exact date that I wanted, and outbound that went through Vancouver so I'd get on the A350. The problem is, right now, there's some sort of billing or there's some sort of booking problem where Alaska is pricing the nonstop to the Philippines correctly at 75K.

So if you just go from Seattle to Manila, it's going to be 75K. However, once you add the flight to Jakarta, it should go up to 85K, but instead it's going to 110K. It's pricing that distance ban based on another award chart, their Asia-Pacific chart.

So I just booked it at the time. I said, okay, I'll have this flight. And thinking that I could either try to get them to give me a refund based on what the tickets should be, or once the return availability opened up, just book a round trip to change the return instead of going from Manila to Jakarta, go from Manila back to Seattle and then pay the extra miles and effectively use that and then just book the awards from Manila in another way. Right. And that seemed like a great idea. So I did it. Everything worked just fine. But then once they return opened, I went to go book the flight.

And it was there. And it allowed me, I hit change and it allowed me to put in the new thing. And then it gave me an error message and said, we can't book this flight. And then it gave, you know, and it kept trying different permutations, different. And it wouldn't give me the, it wouldn't give me the option. So I called up Alaska to see, or atmos, to see what could be done, like if they could do it. And they said, well, this says it right in the terms and conditions, but there's no changes allowed at all. It can only be canceled. So, and the cancellation, they put the certificate back immediately. There's no, it's not like you lose your certificate at all.

But it means that once you booked a flight, you can't make any changes to that flight. Right. And as an aside, I also found out that because you can't book the multi, multi-lake trip, you can't take advantage right now of Alaska's free stopover policy either. Because that was the other thing I was going to do is say, well, I can at least pull apart these two flights and then a manila stopover. Well, you can't do that either right now. They're going to hopefully add that functionality in. So my only options were, and then of course, when I looked then, when I looked then,

there was no more options to go through Vancouver on the A350. The only option was to cancel it and rebook round trip to and from Seattle directly on the 232 flights. So that's where I'm at right now. That's where I'm at right now. And so my question to you, Greg, is what would you do? On the one hand, I have two options right now. I can keep the one overpriced 110k trip that goes on the A350 out, then use my second companion fair to book the same overpriced A350 back through San Francisco, but I have to use two certificates. Or I could cancel the original one, lose my A350 access totally, but then be able to get the whole round trip to and from the Philippines from Seattle for 150,000 points plus 50,000 for the second ticket. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get that. What would

you do? Would you say I want to be most efficient using this award, even at the expense of having to go in the 232 cabin? Poor us, we'd have to go in business class. I mean, I think I would set alerts for the flights I actually want. I think I would keep that outbound that's booked and set alerts for the flights, you know, for flights that you actually want to become available. and if they do, then, then, you know, jump on that. Yeah, you know, I could do that. And I thought about that, actually, because I could wait and see if the same outbound flight becomes available

and then use my companion cert, or just take my wife's and cancel it at that point. My, gosh, I'm hesitant to do that, though, because since I only have about four months to use it, it's not like I have up until you know and we're booking out into next June July right so I don't know we'll see I'll that would be the most sensible thing to do and if I had that much time I would do it but anyway that's what that's where I'm at so I'm I'm in I'm confounded at this moment and so what

will probably happen is I won't do anything and then I'll end up having to book something completely different because all the availability will go away you could happen yeah that's that's a frustrating thing or one of the many it turns out frustrating things about any kind of certificate that, you know, that lasts for a year. If you don't use them pretty soon, you get to a point of like doing something suboptimal just so you can use it and get value from it before it expires, right? And there's always that sort of chicken, I don't know if that's the right word. I was going to say chicken and egg thing, but it's really, it's at, you know, getting towards

the, towards that end date, as you get closer and closer, you get sort of more desperate and you're more willing to do something that you wouldn't have done earlier in the, in the, you know, rolling year that you had it. Anyway, coincidentally, my personal points are also about my Atmos Companion Award certificate, but what I have is the, I haven't gotten my 100K1 yet. I have the 25K1 that came as part of the welcome bonus for signing up for the summit card. And I had used it a while ago to book a flight from Detroit to Seattle and in first class for my wife and I. And that was like decent. It wasn't like the best redemption ever, but, you know, it was about, I think it was about 25K one way for that per person. so, you know, one person was free.

It was somewhere in that range anyway. Unfortunately, we ended up, as the trip is getting very close now, having to change the date on it. And I encountered the same thing that Tim did, that you can't change. So I canceled it, and I was a little scared about, like, will that certificate come back into my account? And luckily, as Tim found, too, it can't. back instantly. Like it was there, you know, the second after I canceled. So that was great. So then, just so everyone knows that it's not always easy even for us, you know, people that are, that podcast about the stuff and blog about this stuff. I went to book the flight we wanted and I was using my certificate again. But this time it was a much worse deal than before because the prices had gone way out.

but, you know, it's like whatever, at least I get 25,000 points off of this flight. And the, it wouldn't accept, there was a problem using my Atma Summit card to pay. And so I tried, like many times, I tried reentering it entirely instead of using the one saved in my account. And it wouldn't work. So rather than just calling, which is. probably what I should have done. I tried using other cards and I, you know, the first card I tried that wasn't a summit card, it of course gave me the error message saying that you have to use an Alaska card in order to book, in order to use the certificate that you're using here. Okay.

So then I remembered my wife has a Atmos business card and it did let me use her card to pay This is just for the taxes and fees, the $11 and whatever. So I finally got it booked. Oh, no, I forgot a really important part of all this. While I was messing around, trying to get it to work, I ended up leaving and coming back to the computer later. And anyway, the fare that was available originally was gone and now was much more expensive.

So what I booked, so what I booked like kind of later, at night because I'm like I have to book something, was much more expensive and I finally got it booked with this other Alaska card. And then I set an alert with Points Path to tell me if the price drops on that flight I just booked. Two days later, the price dropped to what I was trying to book it at in the morning of that day. And this time, so I canceled it again, got the certificate back, and I rebooked it at the lower price. And this time it liked my summit card fine.

So I was able to use my summit card. Who knows what's going on there right now? Yeah, totally. How bizarre. Yeah. Well, good for you, though. That's a great. And that's such a good example of how these tools that are out there can be so helpful

with stuff like that. You don't have to go back and forth and keep checking for it. You can just forget about it. And all of a sudden, hey, look, look, it's the. price that I wanted. Yeah, no, exactly. I've been doing a lot of that, setting alerts for flights I've already booked, especially when they're really expensive. Sometimes you're just like, I want to get the booking all set up. So I book something, even if it's like really expensive. These are usually for domestic flights. And then I set an alert. And I haven't yet had it not at some

point, you know, drop in price. The prices are pretty do bounce around. So that's good if you're watching it. Wow, that's great. Okay. Well, now we are to the end of our pre-main event. And we'll be right back with the main event. And we're back with today's main event, shortcuts to flying blue elite status. And Greg, you just wrote a post that published earlier this week or last week, but within the last week called Elite Status via the Air France KLM card, where you did some pretty interesting math, mathification, easy for me to say. What did you find out? Yeah, well, you know, let's back up a bit and say, why is Flying Blue elite status interesting, first of all? And the thing is, you might, for people who don't fly Air France or KLM often,

you might be like wondering, like, why would I even care about getting that status? And the reason is because they're part of the Sky Team Alliance, they're close partners with Delta. And so when you're flying other Sky Team airlines, including Delta, you will get benefits for having, status with their partner Air France, KLM, Flying Blue. So that's why you'd be interested. And of course, if you do fly Air France or KLM, you would get benefits from having status with them. And now that, as we talked about in an earlier segment of the show,

now that Flying Blue is about to release light fair classes to awards, where you have restrictions, just like basic economy type restrictions, having elites tests can get you out of some of those restrictions. And so it's of interest to you, even if you only fly Air France or KLM for award flights, you might still benefit from elite status. So the other reason it's interesting is because there are some ways of getting status very easily. And so if you're interested in having airily, line elite status that could do some good you might be interested in this. So all right,

let's now talk about what, just the basics of what you would get from different levels of elite status if you go for it. Then we'll talk about shortcuts to getting there. First off, flying blue silver status, that's the lowest level of status. When you're flying Air France or KLM, that'll give you advanced seat selection that you wouldn't normally get with some fare types. It'll give you a free check bag, even on those light basic economy type of fares. When you're flying Delta, having silver status will give you free preferred seat selection, priority boarding, zone five, and a free check bag. So, you know, decent benefits there for flying flying Delta. The next level is gold status. And if you have gold status and you're flying Air France or

KLM, that will give you lounge access. It'll also let you select economy comfort within 72 hours before departure. So that's pretty sweet. And then when you're flying Delta, what you get is zone four boarding, you also get Delta Sky Club access for yourself plus one gas, but only if you're flying a Sky Team airline, including Delta, on an international flight on the same day. So if you're flying domestically on Delta, you're not going to get into the Sky Club with this status. But flying internationally, yeah, you'll get in. The next level is platinum status. And that's the last level we're going to talk about, even though there's a status above that, that's like an optonium. Platinum status will give you free award changes and refunds, even for light fares.

So you can book one of those new light fares that are coming out in September that say no cancellations, no changes, no refunds, but because you have platinum status, you will be allowed to change and refund at no cost to you. you will get better saver level award availability. And I actually had a conversation with Tiffany Funk the other day. She's the VP of the Flying Blue program and a friend of mine. And I asked her, okay, you don't show us how much. If we don't have platinum status, we can't see award availability.

So we've heard it's better. And, you know, basically her answer is it is really strong. significant. It is much, much better. So I'm just going on her word for it, but I believe that also from people who have platinum status who have said that they've had really good luck finding good awards. So that's a great feature. The other thing platinum status would give you is the ability to book Air France's law premier first class awards. That's a very special first class product. It's not available on all flights, but on flights where it is. I'm sure it would be a delightful experience caution. Even if you have platinum status, it's going to cost a tremendous number of miles

to book it. But if it's a bucket list item for you, then this unlocks that potential. Well, you know, that's really interesting. I mean, it's interesting to see this as well, see that framework within the context of the award changes that they've made. Because really, I mean, even with silver status, you're starting to blunt a fair amount of those light fare restrictions, a meaningful amount of those light fare restrictions. Yeah, you are except for the no changes or cancellations. That part, you need to get all the way to platinum to get rid of that. But yeah, basically, if you don't mind having a basically non-refundable fare,

you know, there's very little difference between booking a standard and a light fair if you have at least silver status. So that's a good thing. Totally. Well, so given that, like, how do you, what are the nuts and bolts of how you earn Flying Blue elite status? Yeah. So, you know, different programs have different names for the points you get towards status. and Flying Blue calls them experience points or XP, just the letters XP. And what is very different with Flying Blue's elite program than any of the ones in America

that we're used to is that it's not calendar year based. So in all of the U.S. programs, you have a set 12-month period where you have to earn a certain number of status points to get to whatever level you're trying to achieve. Most of them, it's calendar year, American Airlines. It's a little bit offset from calendar year, but still, it's a fixed time period. With Flying Blue, and this is true also of some other programs in Europe, you, the status you achieve is based on sort of a rolling 12 months. And the way it works is it takes a certain number of experience points to get to a level of status and that same number to maintain that level of status. So let me give an example. Silver status requires 100 XP. So if you're

starting from nothing and over the next, let's say next six months, you earn 100 XP, you will then get silver status and the clock restarts then. You now have 12 months to either earn 100xp, again, to maintain silver status for another 12 months. You can earn 180 XP to bump up to gold status. And so this is where things get really confusing for people who aren't used to this kind of thing. You don't, there's no mechanism to jump. You don't, there's no mechanism to jump, using XP to jump right from nothing to gold. So you can't just say, I'm going to run out and earn 280 XP and get gold because that won't happen because what will happen is, I'm sorry, 180.

What happens is the first 100 XP you earn if you don't have any status will get erased once you are given silver status. So you get the 100 XP, you get silver status, now you lose those 100 XP. Any extras do roll over, though. So let's say you've earned 105. You know, then when they give you silver status, they'll take 100 of those away, and 5 XP will roll over. And then now you can earn 180 XP towards gold. And then once you're at gold, you have 12 months to earn 300 XP to get to platinum.

And that's how you move your way up. So I mentioned XP rollover. That's capped at 300 XP each time or per 12 months, I think. Another thing to know is they do have soft landings officially, which means if you don't earn enough XP to maintain the level of status you're at, you'll only drop down one level. So if you were at platinum and you don't earn 300 XP over the next 12 months, you'll drop down to gold. And then it'll just take you 300 XP from there to earn back platinum in that case. So effectively, if I understand correctly on this one, if you were to earn platinum status, you would get 12 months of platinum status. If you didn't do anything else, then after that you would go down to gold, you'd get 12 months of gold.

If you didn't do anything else, after that, you get 12 months of silver. So you effectively be guaranteed three years of elite status by earning platinum once. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's my understanding. The last thing I want to say about sort of how status is earned is there's also a level called platinum for life. If you have platinum for 10 consecutive years, then they give you platinum for life and you can stop earning XP's and just keep it.

So that's something to aspire to, I suppose. The normal way to earn XP's before we start talking about shortcuts is flying on paid fares. And basically they have sort of zone distance-based combination that tells you how many XP you'll earn for different flights. Just for example, flights within one country, an economy segment flown will earn 2xp doesn't matter how far you're flying within the country you just get 2xp premium economy gets four business class gets six and first class gets 10 although most flights within a country are not first class as defined by this right so like first class within the u.s is counted as business class because it's more akin to European business class, basically.

And then for flights that are international, like cross countries, it's broken down by zones of distance. So under 2,000 miles, economy gets 5 XP, premium economy gets 10 XP and so on. The next distance band is called Long, which is distance of 2,000. to 3,500 miles. And then they ran out of words. So instead of saying longer, the next distance span is long two. Oh, that's great.

Yeah. Which is 3,500 to 5,000 miles. And then long three is over 5,000 miles. And so the number of XP you get is increasingly large with, you know, as you get to the next band and so on, distance-wise. So if you're telling me that all I need to do to earn silver status and get advanced seat selection and free check bag is to take 50 Air France economy flights within France and then I'd have it. Yeah, that's all you need to do.

But that seems like that seems really long and arduous and nothing we'd ever want to do. So like what are the shortcuts? That's where this stuff gets fun, I imagine. Yeah. That's and that's what this is really all. about the shortcuts. First, I'm going to differentiate two types of shortcuts broadly. One type is where you do something to get status all at once. You're not getting XP's. You're just getting status. And those are usually status matches. The other type is ways of getting more XP's, basically. And there's a

whole list of those we'll get to. But first, let's talk about the all at once options. The ones that I'm aware of is there is a flying blue status match, and the rules are a little bit different based on what country you reside in. So for U.S. residents, we have a post about this, and we'll link to it in the show notes. You can match to silver if you have like American Airlines gold status, United Silver status, or Canada's Elite 25 status. you might notice I did not mention Delta because you can't match from Delta since their partners, they don't, they're not trying to whoop. So when they do these matches, they're trying to woo people away from American Airlines or United or whatever.

And so if they offered a match from Delta, Delta wouldn't like that, right? The catch is even, you have to pay $99 to do that match. It's not a free status match. So $99, you get silver status. if you have one of those other statuses that count. There's a whole list of other statuses from around the world, airlines around the world that can also count for silver. So if you have like British Airways status or something like that,

you can probably do this as well. I only included the ones that would be most relevant, I thought, to our audience. You could also match to gold status for $199 if you have American Airlines platinum status, United Gold status, or Air Canada Elite 50 status. So that is, that's the flying blue status match. The other status match you can do is if you have built, I was about to say built palladium stuff, built platinum status.

Then you can match to flying blue gold, but you're required to, in the process of matching to gold, you're required to transfer 10,000 built points to flying blue. at a one-to-one ratio, which, you know, I see is fine. It's a lot better than paying $199 to do a status match to gold, you know. And so if you have built platinum status, I really think that's a good way to go to get gold, to get Flying Blue Gold. Do note that it doesn't give you XP, so it's not getting you, you know, any XP towards platinum. unlike most status matches, because of the weird way flying blue status works, it is getting you closer to platinum.

Because remember, if you started from nothing and start earning XP, you have to first get silver, then get gold, then 300 XP to get platinum. If you do this status match first, you just need the 300 XP to get to platinum. So it does give you a leg up in that way. Like, I mean, essentially, that match to gold, even though it doesn't officially give you XP, it really gives you 280 XP worth of earning because that gets you all the, instead of having to do five years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's great. Yeah, it really is. Okay.

Now I'm going to talk about a bunch of ways to get XP faster and easier. One, or I'm going to talk about a few ways that involve actually flying on paid flights. So one kind of obvious-ish one is that instead of flying nonstop, fly multiple segments. You earn XP on each segment individually. The next suggestion is fly international instead of domestic. International flights earn two and a half as many XP's as domestic flights. So the, at least first for the lowest distance band anyway of international flights. So the, you know, if you're in Europe, it's really easy to fly internationally.

You could probably even, you know, fly international on one ticket going one way. Each segment could be an international flight, right? Like you could be flying Paris to. Netherlands to Denmark or something. So that would be two international flights on one ticket right there and it would earn a lot

of XP that way. The other way to earn a lot of XP is by booking business class or in the U.S. first class. Business class earns three times as many XP's as economy. And so if you can find

tickets where the price for business class or regional first class is not a big multiple over economy, it can be totally worth it if you're out to get more XP. The best thing, of course, is to combine all these things and do things like within the U.S. You want to fly international, but you don't want to pay a lot. Well, if you're positioned in a place where you can do relatively cheap international flights like Seattle to Vancouver or Detroit to Toronto or New York City to Toronto or Montreal or even fly. And those are all Delta flights examples, but you could also do Aero Mexico and fly from, you know,

one of the southern states to Mexico, for example. And so there's a lot of options that are probably better or worse depending on where you live, you know, as to how reasonable they are and how cheap they would be to do. But if you do those, and especially if you can book business class, the equivalent of business class for those, you'll earn a ton of XP on those often very short flights and sometimes pretty inexpensive flights. Now, I'm assuming that even with partners, you still have to, it still has to be a paid flight, right? Like a Delta Award flight won't earn you XP. That's right. That's right. Okay. Now going outside of flying, there's There are a bunch of ways to earn XP.

You could donate miles to charities. So every 2,000 flying blue miles, you donate to a handful of charities that they offer. You get one XP for every 2,000. So if you're, you know, looking for, I just need 10 XP more to reach the next level, 20,000 flying blue miles donated. And boom, you got it. Another way is to contribute to sustainable aviation fuel. You earn one XP for every 10 euros contributed.

And the way this works is usually you'll see it, I'm told, on the checkout process when you're buying a flight through like Air France or KLM. But I think you can also do it by like, if you've already bought. the flight, go in to manage flight or something, and you should have the option to buy this sustainable aviation fuel and get XP from that. Another way, and this is a one-time thing, is Flying Blue has a partnership with Accord. And so if you link your Air France Flying Blue and Accor Live Live, list accounts, you can get 10 free XP as sort of a sign-up bonus kind of thing. Five of those XP come after your first KLM or Air France flight that you take after linking

those accounts. And five more come after your first decor hotel stay after linking those accounts. So that's a nice little thing, but again, just one time. And then finally, the big... sort of super powered shortcut. And that's what the post I wrote is all about that Tim mentioned before, is using the Air France K-Lam credit card, the one that's issued in the United States.

It has amazing XP earnings. So first of all, I'll just talk about the card at a very, very high level. It's an $89 annual fee card. And you get 5,000 flying blue miles. Every anniversary, as long as you spend at least 50 bucks on the card. So the card is sort of like close to free-ish, if you value those miles pretty highly. And it has decent earning. I mean, so you get 3X on Air France, KLM, and Sky Team purchases.

I found that really interesting because I think that means booking Delta flights with this card. you're going to get 3x. And so that's as good or better than any delta card. So that's pretty smart of them. You also get 3x for dining. And this is the best, I think, is that 1.5x everywhere else.

So outside of bonus categories, you're getting at least not a terrible rate of return, which is great. All right. So that's the basics, but let's talk XP because there's all kinds of ways to get XP with this card. First of all, the welcome bonus, at least as we're required,

this and it's been around for a while, gives you 100 XP as just part of the welcome bonus. So once you meet the minimum spend requirements, 100 XP right there, that'll give you silver status. Boom. And then every account anniversary, you get 20 XP more, and that's an ongoing thing. Then you can also earn up to 140 additional XP every anniversary by spending enough on the card. And so there's two tranches of XP's you can earn each year. You can earn 80 XP with $15,000 of card membership year spend. And then another 60 XP if you get to $25,000 spent.

That's not another $25,000. That's another $10,000 to get you from $15,000 to $25,000. So for those who don't have much trouble spending $25,000 on a card in a year, you're going to be getting 160 XP every year just by spending the 25,000. And in the first year, because of that 100 XP bonus, you're going to be getting 260 XP. All right. Now, let's talk about how the card can be used for different status levels. If your goal is just silver status, then I mentioned you get that right off the bat because the welcome bonus will get you there.

But also, just spending $15,000 per year on the card gives you 80 XP, plus you get 20 XP as an automatic thing just for having the card. So 100 XP every year, that's all you need to get and maintain silver status. So if that's your total goal is silver status, spend $15,000 a year on the card and you're done. There's nothing more you need to think about. Gold status, it's a little more. complicated because you really want the 100 XP from the welcome bonus to count towards your first year gold status, not to be erased by achieving silver status. So ideally, you do a status match, either from built or the paid one to gold status. Before, and you,

after you've signed up for the card, but before you get the welcome offer, and I said after you sign up for the card, because you want that, it's really complicated. So I don't think I'm going to try to explain why, but you want the status match you start, which lasts for 12 months, to last until your next card member anniversary when you get all those other XPs. And so you do that. you spend $25,000 each year, thanks to the fact that XP's roll over, $25,000 per year, you're going to start with a big rollover the first year if you do the timing right. Right, right.

And so $25,000 each year with all the XP's you get, plus the rollovers, you'll be able to maintain gold stats for a long time. Like, I don't think you need to worry about how you get XP's if gold is your goal. platinum, you can't get it just from spend alone on this card, not just one card anyway. So very complicated. Read the post about how you can do the timing to get really close to platinum status the first year, but you've got to do that same kind of timing I just talked about for gold. And that'll get you close, but you also need to earn some more XP, 40 XP, I think,

during that 12 months, and then you'll get to platinum. But then after that, this card, you know, 25,000 will get you a little more than halfway towards the XP needed to maintain platinum each year after that. But still, I mean, that's really significant. Getting 180 of the 300 XP needed year after year is really good. So, I mean, that first year, really that it would only be about a 40 XP gap to get platinum if you started out with either paying for a gold match or getting the gold match from So that's for all those other techniques to earn XP's that you went through.

Exactly. Because you'd be making up that difference outside of just spending the $25,000 on the card. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, a couple of two or three, I can't remember segments. If you could do an international first class, like fly, you know, if I could do Detroit to Toronto in first class a couple times, that should get me there. Right. If I were to do it. So that's great.

I mean, it's really a bizarre system and it's completely unintuitive, especially with all of the, with the way this front for, for U.S.-based war travelers. Even if you're used to other programs, I've never seen anything else like it. And, but that is a cool opportunity, especially if you start out with the match. So are you going to do that? Like, are you, you already did the built to Flying Blue match, didn't you, to get gold? I did. And the timing is unfortunate.

it. So, you know, that match runs out in January. So if I did, if I, if I, if I'm understanding all the timing correctly, I think I really need to, um, wait until after that runs out, uh, and then start the whole process of signing up for cards and stuff, starting up for the card and, and then matching again at the right time after that. So that the 12 months starts at the right. moment basically. I mean, either that or I guess I could sign up right before that. I could sign up maybe right before my status runs out and just make sure not to get the welcome bonus until I've done the match again.

Right, right. Is there any sort of cooling off period in terms of when you can rematch through built platinum? I don't think so, but I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. So as far as you know, once it expires, you could transfer another 10,000 points and just rematch to gold. That's my understanding. I hope that's right. That's fun. I mean, that, especially for someone like you who has long looked at, looked lustily at La Premiere, that's a fun, that's a fun, you know, opportunity.

Because yes, it would only, you'd really only be able to sensibly do it one year. but if you did it for that year, that gives you a full year to book Law Premier and do something fun. Yeah. Actually, I mean, Law Premier is not a driving force for me. I mean, it looks like it'd be great, but it's not, I don't know. For some reason, I'm not, I'm not that excited to go out of my way to fly it. I don't know why. It's hard to explain. But the ability to get the, better award availability at that saver level. We have a nice flight out of Detroit to Paris. And so if we could go to Europe basically almost anytime we want at that low level

and get free changes and cancellations, I mean, that combination is so good because it means, you know, I could set even if it's not available, I can, you know, watch and book when it is. And even if I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to go to Europe during that time, but I know I have a free time during this time. So I'll book it and we'll decide later whether we're going to use it. That'd be great. Totally. So one more question for you in terms of just your personal plans is my thought immediately goes to, well, hey, you can only, you can earn so much more in the first year with the Air France, with the KLM master, with the flying blue master card. If you did that, let's say you earn platinum, you get the card, you get the welcome bonus.

Would you then, after your first year of the card, cancel so that you could try and rebook or sign up again for the card later and rinse, wash, and repeat? Or would you more just be looking at it as a way to maintain status after that, or neither? Yeah, I don't know. I think I would actually look into, is it possible to get two of these cards? Because if that's possible, get two, then you can go nuts. Pretty soon you're going to have flying blue unobtainium status. Yeah, except that one, you don't get it from XP's.

You need UxPs to get that next level, which are actual paid flights on Air France and KLM only, not even partner flights count. Well, all you have to do is take 450 Air France economy flights within France and you'll have an opinion status. There you go. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get it. more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it

a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag, you can send that to mailbag at frequentmiler.com.